


Do(n't) Touch Me

by kiri_bronach



Series: Touch Starved Five [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Number Five | The Boy Has Issues, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 20:03:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18506095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiri_bronach/pseuds/kiri_bronach
Summary: Five wants a hug, but he doesn't believe that anyone wants to hug him.





	Do(n't) Touch Me

Five learns “don’t touch me” from a father he thinks would rather die than show his children affection. He learns it from brothers who jump like frightened cats when he so much as taps their shoulder. He learns it from a mother who never offers him a hug he didn’t have to ask for. Five learns “don’t touch me” from believing he’s the only one who doesn’t truly mean it.

He’s six and he’s scraped his knee. He’s crying and fussing because it hurts and he wants to be held. But Grace just smiles passively, barely touching him except to keep him still as she cleans the scratch. That’s when it hits him. No one in his family has ever been the one to initiate contact between them.

He’s ten and it’s an actual effort not to lean too close to Ben or Klaus in the family picture. He can feel the inches between them like a physical ache. It would be so easy, just a slight sway to the left or right and his arm would brush against theirs. But he knows he can’t, so he stands there, too still and too stiff, trying too hard not to look miserable. It’s the worst picture anyone has ever taken of him.

He’s twelve and he sees the term ‘touch averse’ in his psychology textbook. The phrase frustrates him to no end. He’s a smart kid, but he can’t understand. It doesn’t make sense to him that there would be a whole word for something that everyone feels. Well, everyone but him. But in a venn diagram between  _ that _ and  _ things he is ready to admit _ , the two circles aren’t even on the same page. He doesn’t understand and he hates it. Hates that he doesn’t understand. Hates that there’s a name for what’s normal but not even an indication of the opposite existing. It feels like confirmation that he really is the odd one out.

He’s twenty-six and in some ways the apocalypse is a relief. He doesn’t have to think about whether or not he should want touch when it's not an option anyway. He doesn't have to worry about whether or not he's normal now that he constitutes 100% of the human population.

He's fifty-eight and time travel has once again turned his world upside down. The apocalypse is going to happen but it might not but it already has. He's fifty-eight but he looks thirteen. He was born on the same day as his siblings but they're decades younger than him. And somehow none of this is the confusing part. The confusing part is all the little touches. 

They’re there in the days before the apocalypse he almost stops. They’re there in the childhood he brings his family back to.  He tries to write it off as something else. He denies, denies, denies. Adult-Klaus drapes his arms across the others’ backs because sometimes drugs make you do weird things. Child-Diego clings to Ben when Reginald yells in the same way he would cling to a piece of furniture he hid behind. A myriad other gestures that can be waved away in a myriad of desperate excuses. Deny, deny, deny, even when the excuses don’t make sense.

There will come a time when the excuses dry up and Five has to acknowledge that his siblings are more touchy-feely than he remembers. He’ll put that time off as long as he can, though. He’ll hold onto the idea that he is alone in his lack of touch aversion despite the pain it’s brought him. Because if he’s wrong, that means it’s something personal. If he’s wrong, “they don’t want touch” becomes “they don’t want  _ his  _ touch”. And he's sure he couldn't handle that.   


End file.
